


Memento Vixi

by JaneTurenne



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), Gallifrey (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: F/M, crackship what crackship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-23
Updated: 2013-05-23
Packaged: 2017-12-12 19:07:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/814981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaneTurenne/pseuds/JaneTurenne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A dead Time Lady who is really a human and a dead Time Lord who is really a popsicle meet for the first time (again) in the blackness between worlds...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memento Vixi

**Author's Note:**

  * For [timelordsandkittens](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=timelordsandkittens).



> Happy Birthday Elli! I apologize once again for this ship, and accept full responsibility.
> 
> Many beta thanks to agapi42.

“Why would you do this to me?” he asks, as his fingers press purple marks into her arm without either of them noticing.

“I’m not the one who gave the order. That was the late and unlamented President Pandak. ‘Any accomplice to the crimes of the fugitive known as the Doctor will be considered legally complicit in his crimes and share in the punishment thereof.’’ Is it weird, being killed by a dead man? Yeah, that’s definitely weird. Well. At least it’s not a boring way to go.”

“How can you be so _calm_?

“I knew what it would cost, helping the Doctor escape.” She stops and looks at him, then. “I always knew. The Chancellery Training Academy, that was just killing time in the meanwhile, good way to be at the right place at the right time. Only one way to get assigned to guard the TARDIS repair department, after all. Boring as anything, most of the time, all that standing around in front of doors--would hardly have been worth living thirteen lives like _that_ anyway. But apart from the right-place-right-time part, there was one good thing about it.” She wraps one hand around the back of his neck, her fingers sliding into his hair, five fingertips and a palmsworth of skin that seem to him to encompass galaxies. She grins, strange and lopsided and un-Time Lady-like in so many ways, and it tugs him apart just like it always does. “Care to guess what that might be?”

He doesn’t even understand what she’s doing, not until she’s doing it, but he doesn’t doubt that he wants it, not at all. There is a spirit brewed from cadenflowers in autumn, crisp and light and very, very intoxicating. The taste of her lips, it turns out, is just like that--and it’s so _senseless_ , thinks the part of him that stands outside and watches (the one that wants nothing more than to spend thirteen lives standing guard), such an irrational act, such an _idiotic_ thing to do. But his hands are around her hips, anyway, and she’s so small, so strangely and compellingly compact to contain so much and be so much--and the hole, the gaping vacuum in his universe that will tear into being when she disappears, will be so large that anything good in him will rush inside and vanish with her.

“Why would you do this?” he repeats, and only then realizes they’ve stopped kissing. “Your one remaining privilege, to choose your executioner. Why would you do this to me?”

She smiles, and he recognizes behind it her sadness and her fear. “Because in five microspans, you won’t remember you ever knew me,” she says. “But for those five microspans, I needed you with me. I’m not sure I can do this alone.” She’s shaking now, her confidence gone, and she reaches out for his hand. “I can be brave,” she says. “I can walk through that door. But only if you help me face this. Please.”

Five microspans later, standing alone outside the Oubliette of Eternity, Hallan wipes an irritating drop of moisture from his cheek, and wonders who he has been crying for.

*

“Doctor, I thought you said we were in space.”

“We are in space!”

“Well, yeah, I s’pose, space like ‘not Earth’, but I thought you meant ‘floating between the stars’ not ‘landed on some other planet.’”

“Landed? What d’you mean, landed? Look!” The Doctor pulls up an image on the scanner. “ _Space_. Vast, cold, starry, all those good things. Beautiful! Now what’s all this about a planet?”

“Oh,” says Clara. “Well, I just assumed.”

“Assumed? _Assumed_? No, no, no, the universe is big and complicated and infinitely variable, Clara, and when you go around _assuming_...”

“...Because if we’re not on any planet, that makes it more than a little odd that somebody’s been knocking on the door, wouldn’t you say?”

The Doctor blinks. The knocking sound resumes. The Doctor blinks again, and then brightens. “Ah, but y’see, that’s not knocking,” he says, triumphantly. “That’s _bumping_.”

“Yeah, all right,” Clara concedes. “But don’t you think we’d better see what it is?”

“Well,” says the Doctor, with that playing-it cool act that has never fooled anyone. “I _suppose_ it wouldn’t hurt.”

The TARDIS door opens by a crack. Two faces, pressed one atop the other, peer through the gap. There is an expectant silence.

“Go ahead,” says the Doctor, with all the suppressed excitement of a kid in a candy store. “Say it.”

Clara sighs. “What is it, Doctor?” she asks.

The Doctor beams. “It’s a cryo-suspension pod! Standard design for advanced races, she’s a _beauty_. Built to last, this one, look at her!” The Doctor grasps the handle of the cryo-pod and hauls it over the threshold and into the TARDIS. Clara, ever the more sensible, pushes the door closed behind him.

The Doctor runs his hands over the cryo-pod like a connoisseur, like a lover. “Oh, this is _brilliant_ ,” he enthuses. “Technology like this, it could practically be from...”

He stops. Clara walks around to the other side of the cryo-pod to find that the Doctor has frozen with his fingers over a small metal panel, embossed with a circle full of lines and dots and swirls. “Doctor?” she asks.

“Gallifrey,” he says, staring. “It’s from Gallifrey.”

“Gallifrey?” Clara asks. “But I thought...”

“I know what you thought,” the Doctor says, his fingers suddenly flying over the keypad of the cryo-pod. “I know what you thought, because it’s what I thought, and so it’s what I told you, but maybe, maybe I was _wrong_ and it’s...”

The pod opens with a _whoosh_ , and a man in a red uniform collapses directly onto Clara, who manages to execute a sort of spin as his weight knocks her over, and to sit down hard with his torso draped over hers. Gravity, acting as gravity does, pulls him down, but she just manages to nudge him in such a way that his head ends up in her lap, turned up towards her face--just in time for his eyes to snap open.

Their gazes meet and lock.

He frowns.

She frowns.

“Commander!” the Doctor shouts, scooping the other man from Clara’s lap and kissing him, very loudly, on one cheek and then the other. “Ha ha!” The Doctor spins the still barely-conscious man, stumbles under the weight that his legs cannot properly support, and lands them both back on the floor. Clara manages, once again, to arrange matters so the man’s head lands in her lap.

“Have I met...” she begins, staring down at him.

“I think I know...” he says, staring up at her.

“Never mind all that, no time, no time, can’t you see the Commander here needs the medical bay?” the Doctor tsks, hefting the man up again. “Take his other arm, Clara, there’s a good-- _whoops_ a daisy, now let’s just... right, veering now, veering hard, Clara, Clara, compensaaaate...”

The journey down the corridor is fraught with peril and babble, or, at the very least, with perilous babble. Clara focuses on keeping the mystery man from bumping into any walls. Then the moment they’ve got him laid down on a medical bed, just as their eyes are locking, the Doctor sticks a syringe in the man’s arm and knocks him straight back out again.

“Doctor!” Clara complains. “He’s just _been_ asleep for who _knows_ how long!”

“Not asleep, frozen,” the Doctor corrects. “He’s been _frozen_ , for... well, five centuries, give or take, if that capsule wasn’t lying. Not the same as sleep! Very hard on the system. He could use a good rest. He’s a Time Lord, Clara, a _Time Lord_! Another one, after all this time! Do you think I’m going to risk his system just... shutting down, because I couldn’t let him have a proper rest? When I’ve only just _found_ him?”

“But we don’t even know his...” Clara trails off, suddenly feeling that what she’s about to say is blatantly wrong, “...name,” she finishes.

The Doctor gives her a momentary quizzical look. “Time for all that,” he says. “All kinds of time. Come on, let him sleep. It’ll be... days, probably.”

Clara shakes her head. “No.”

The Doctor frowns. “No?”

“I won’t leave him.”

She expects him to argue. But he must hear something in her tone, and shrugs instead. “Please yourself,” he says. “I’ll go... repair something. There must be _something_ that needs repairing, there always is. Or ten things. Not the chameleon circuit, though, that’s always... _disconcerting_. Doctor without the blue box, what good is...”

The Doctor catches Clara’s ‘Shut up, Doctor’ look. “Right,” the Doctor says. “I’ll just...” His pointing fingers precede him out the door.

Clara pulls up a chair, and sits beside the strange Gallifreyan’s bed. She looks him over, and frowns again. And then, carefully, she takes his hand in both of hers, and settles in for a wait.

*

The second time Clara falls asleep in her chair, she wakes up to find herself being watched.

“Oh,” she says. “Hello. You should’ve woken me.”

He watches her through eyes drawn narrow with thought. “I was trying to decide which was the right question.”

“Which?” she asks.

“‘Why do I know you,’” he says, “or ‘Why _don’t_ I know you?’”

She holds his eyes. “Yeah,” she says. “I... get that.” They continue to stare, and then she gives a little lopsided smile. Something twists sharply in his chest. “Well. I s’pose we won’t find the answers any easier with you stuck there in that bed. You up to coming with me? Get you something to eat?”

He sits up, carefully, testing his strength. “I think so.”

She sits beside him on the edge of the bed, and slips her arm around him to help him stand. He watches her all the time. “You’re awfully light on the _other_ questions, y’know,” she points out. “Where am I, how long have I been out, who are you, how did I get here. The classics.”

“You haven’t asked me who I am either,” he points out.

“No,” she agrees--and there it is again, the eye contact, far too close and far too long. “I’m not sure we really need to.”

He shakes his head slowly. “I really don’t think we do.”

This time, she tucks her smile away quietly, like a secret that she knows he’ll find out anyway. “Right then, lazy,” she says, turning them in the direction of the galley. “Let’s get hopping.”

He stares at her all the way down the corridor, and she never does manage to fully hide her smile.


End file.
